Reduce Noise in My Photo?

Go to the Detail panel (in the Develop module’s right side Panels area), and you’ll see the Noise Reduction section right below Sharpening. There are two parts to this section: The Luminance slider reduces the noise specks you see in an image by slighting blurring the image (that’s pretty much what noise reduction does—it hides the noise behind a blur). If you drag the Luminance slider to the right, and you start to see that you’re losing either detail or contrast in the image, you can use the two sliders right below to add them back. You’d use the Color slider if you saw red, green, and blue specks in your image—this does a good job of desaturating them, so you don’t see them. Dragging this slider too far to the right can, once again, cause a loss of detail, so you can bring back some of that detail using the Detail slider below. The Smoothness slider is different—it doesn’t bring back stuff. You’d use this to smooth out larger patches of color noise—just drag it to the right to help smooth those patchy areas out (you probably won’t see these larger patches unless you’re brightening up a really dark area in your image). Keep this one thing in mind when you’re reducing noise: Using this feature blurs your image, from a little to a lot, depending on how far you drag the sliders. So, think of this as a balancing act—your job is to find that amount at which the noise is reduced without the image getting too soft.